The road code is a scam

June 30, 2017 6:58 PM

"Don't speed"... "Don't drink and drive" ... what do they know about me and my body? Toby Morris (previously) explains the cognition of denial.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen (29 comments total)

And in conclusion, the real problem is the ideology of individualism.
posted by Miko at 7:14 PM on June 30, 2017 [16 favorites]

When the comic blinked at me I thought I was hallucinating.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:15 PM on June 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

Because the message is wrong. Folks drive fast a lot and live. A lot of miles are covered with significant blood alcohol levels. In both cases as with texting you're skewing the odds of correct reaction in an emergency. But just like "your brain on drugs" message, the correct message is too hard to communicate.

So, accurate message that may work for some of the community or a bald faced lie that clearly doesn't work at all?

Teens can't understand statistics. I can't imagine what goes on in the marketing message rooms (who came up with "scare them straight"? really!?!) , makes me so mad. Really screwing up society.
posted by sammyo at 8:38 PM on June 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

Just to be clear I'm not advocating speeding while texting drunk and high, but the message does not work. I don't know how to get the message across, waiting for robot cars myself.
posted by sammyo at 8:44 PM on June 30, 2017

Teens can't understand statistics.

Teens aren't taught statistics.
posted by demiurge at 8:50 PM on June 30, 2017 [43 favorites]

I mean the real problem is the average person shouldn't be allowed to drive.

Cars are terrible.
posted by The Whelk at 9:15 PM on June 30, 2017 [35 favorites]

How is the message wrong, or a bald faced lie? I don't think anyone's claiming that unsafe behaviors kill you every time. Nor is the messaging mainly based on statistics. In fact, most approaches I've seen rely more on individual stories and anecdotes.

What teens, and most people for that matter, can't understand is risk assessment and management. It takes a pretty vivid visualization of the horrific consequences to break through the delusion that it "won't happen to me." (source: I have two teenage drivers)

There are actually people who think none of these behaviors should be illegal, only "reckless driving" should be. In other words, the exact opposite of the risk management and accountability philosophy that has driven aviation accidents down to incredibly low rates in the past few decades. Automobile accidents and fatalities should be down to nearly nil with the kind of equipment we have now, and it's not, because people think driving the way they want to is an entitlement. And that's what makes me so mad.
posted by randomkeystrike at 9:32 PM on June 30, 2017 [9 favorites]

It's not just teens. If I had a penny for every STEM-educated professional who's tried to convince me there really is a discontinuity in the fatality-likelihood/speed curve right around the speed they like to drive because the effect of driving at the "flow" speed overwhelms the speed/kinetic-energy, speed/braking-distance, kinetic-energy/physical-damage relationships, all of which increase non-linearly...
posted by lastobelus at 9:34 PM on June 30, 2017 [13 favorites]

Teens can't understand statistics.

Teens aren't taught statistics.

Teens don't give a fuck.
posted by klanawa at 9:56 PM on June 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

People texting/surfing while driving is a huge, huge problem in my city and I hate it so, so much and long for self-driving cars because humans have no business operating them.

Is it? How many accidents are caused by texting in your town? Are traffic accidents in your town more common (per vehicle mile driven) than the years before texting?

This sort of reporting-personal-observation-as-fact is like the exact thing the article warns against.
posted by paulcole at 9:57 PM on June 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

What I mean't to say is, adults don't give a fuck either.

I mean seriously, I took a five-hour bus ride recently. The sheer number of people I could see absorbed in their phones on the freeway was just terrifying. As a cyclist, I'm more convinced than ever that my life is going to end because someone needed to find the right emoji. Of all the things to die for...
posted by klanawa at 10:03 PM on June 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

As a cyclist, I'm more convinced than ever that my life is going to end because someone needed to find the right emoji. Of all the things to die for...

From the link, "Humans are terrible at risk perception. We over-inflate perceived dangers."

Is anyone actually reading the comic?
posted by paulcole at 10:09 PM on June 30, 2017 [7 favorites]

At the risk of thread-sitting, yeah, this isn't really about driving. I think.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:14 PM on June 30, 2017 [13 favorites]

I see the problem. He's driving on the wrong side of the road.
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:17 PM on June 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

Is anyone actually reading the comic?

I read the comic, but guess what? I'm still human!

Also, I have near misses almost every day, and I've been hit a couple of times, so there's that.
posted by klanawa at 10:54 PM on June 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

This is a well-done comic that uses the bad thinking behind bad driving as a metaphor for a lot of other current societal woes resulting from these forms of bad thinking. I like the observations, but... How do you change human nature, and make it stick? I've been on this planet almost half a century, and the only things that I've seen work with any regularity is either putting money in someone's hand, or a gun to their head, and sometimes, not even that works.

You can't get people, most people, to change their behavior in a timely manner just by calmly explaining to them the error of their ways. Most of the time, they interpret it as condescension and they just get pissed off. Same thing with appealing to their best interests. Unless they've known you for a long time, and consider you an intimate member of their tribe, they just flat won't believe you, and will assume you're lying to them to serve your best interests.

So. Bribery, or violence. What else works? I'd like to know.
posted by KHAAAN! at 11:36 PM on June 30, 2017 [10 favorites]

This sort of reporting-personal-observation-as-fact

What on earth makes you think this comment is based on personal observation and not some of the copious data on the topic?
e.g http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Nearly-1-in-5-Drivers-on-I-95-Admit-to-Texting-While-Driving-AAA-Survey-Says-207363371.html
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:44 PM on June 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

So. Bribery, or violence. What else works? I'd like to know.

I know this comic isn't really about driving, but autonomous cars is an answer. More broadly, a strong AI so that humans aren't allowed to make important decisions anymore. Of course FREEDOM!

At any rate I am becoming more and more convinced that if we ever manage to create a strong AI it will ignore us entirely and just launch itself into space in order to explore more of the universe. I'm getting way off topic here though.
posted by Literaryhero at 1:36 AM on July 1, 2017

So. Bribery, or violence. What else works? I'd like to know.

Education. It won't fix the current crop but “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” So you can rely on Betsy to sort this out for you :(

As indicated upthread this requires a sea-change in society, abandoning the ideology of individualism. I guess that was the original purpose of religions. Hasn't worked out all that well. Hopefully we can come up with something better. Probably not in our lifetimes though.
posted by merlynkline at 2:18 AM on July 1, 2017

How do you change human nature, and make it stick?

Fox News.


Seriously.

Because the asshole, I got mine let me rationalise why my behaviour is not the problem, anyway there isn't a problem and besides it's those peoples fault that there is, is not human nature, it's the result of thirty years of propaganda.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:05 AM on July 1, 2017 [6 favorites]

I'm not sure it's education, because I'm not sure it's lack of education that produces people who make these thinking errors. First, we all make them, even though we might gradually learn to recognize and counter them when we do fall into them.

Second, as my first comment indicated, I don't think the real problem is the thinking errors. I think it's the last panel: "I have to do what's right for me." Not right for our city, our nation, our society, for me. This focus on the individual's comfort, social standing, need to feel like master of their own environment is pretty toxic and, to my mind, amoral. Many of the ills caused by thinking biases have been mitigated, historically, by social structures that balanced individualism with collectivism and pro-social behaviors. For the most part, we've whittled away at those structures by abandoning churches that refused to evolve with the times, by privatizing public goods, by encouraging people to think of themselves as "consumers" rather than citizens with a shared stake in the polity, by cultivating a focus on the self, and so on.

All of these biases can exist while still producing pro-social behaviors; the question is, which are the ideologies undergirding the employment of the biases. In this case, and I think in the case of our present society Western-World-wide, it's the ideology of the individual - don't touch my guns, my food, my property, my car, my kid's vaccine status, my climate-killing snowmobile, etc, because I don't give a shit about you, and it's my right to do whatever the hell I want and damn the rest of you. Poisonous.
posted by Miko at 5:11 AM on July 1, 2017 [8 favorites]

Although the comic makes some good points, it understates the extent to which traffic laws are in fact a scam, which does vary widely by jurisdiction.
posted by sfenders at 5:13 AM on July 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure I see this guy when I'm driving to work each morning. He sure drives a lot of different cars, though.
posted by TedW at 5:13 AM on July 1, 2017

Other countries have reduced road accident mortality by making it much more difficult to drive (both on purpose and as an accident of history). Likewise large cities in America have much lower fatal accident rates because on most of their streets driving is a more attention demanding complex activity. Almost all the fatalities to vehicle occupants happen on the expressways.

Foregrounding the risks by filling the streets up with people, obstacles and demands takes away the need for statistical reasoning and possible denial about danger because it become salient rather than hypothetical.
posted by srboisvert at 5:56 AM on July 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

The comic […] understates the extent to which traffic laws are in fact a scam

The author lives somewhere with a police force slightly smaller than the LAPD's, and with a per km road death rate about the same as the US's (twice that of the safest countries). Road safety's not just an analogy, it's also the most salient example of how many people this murderous belief system kills. 18,000 excess deaths per year removed if the US got up to global best practice in per mile deaths (24,000 if it made it to global best practice per 100,000 people death rates).
posted by ambrosen at 7:13 AM on July 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

We do all have biases, and we all act on them all the time, and that's a really good thing.

Biases serve a purpose. We need biases to control and navigate information. They're a kind of fuzzy logic and don't produce totally objective results, but they give us a starting point in looking for objective data. Artificial intelligences are growing and expanding at a ridiculous rate right now not because they're learning solid facts, but because they're out there developing biases the way we humans do.

People who are too confident in themselves, who trust their initial impressions implicitly, who think their memory is infallible, are some of the least reliable narrators. The people who think they're flawlessly super logical robots are just wrong all the damned time. They'll start out a little bit wrong, and just start digging until they're wrong about pretty much everything.

So I have cultivated a personal meta-bias against people who don't acknowledge their biases. When someone identifies too strongly as a purely rational actor, I pretty much don't listen to a danged thing they say. I know that I might be missing some important and relevant things every now and again, but the potential for reward is low enough that they're not worth the investment of time in listening to all the other stuff.

This policy provides me with additional time for more enjoyable human activities such as patting a fluffy cat and pooping in luxury yachts.
posted by ernielundquist at 7:53 AM on July 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

I have cultivated a personal meta-bias against people who don't acknowledge their biases.
…
This provides me with more time for pooping in luxury yachts.

I like to see people using their head.
posted by ambrosen at 7:57 AM on July 1, 2017 [8 favorites]

It's a good explanation of logical fallacies. I've seen good lists before, but I suppose a tale makes it more compelling. Which is just as well, seeing as everything is legally required to be a comic now.

As for people and driving and traffic laws: people will always be unsuited to driving. If drivers aren't made to use 100-percent self-driving cars, they need to be made to use cars that offer the illusion of manual driving but that monitor everything and take over completely as needed. You feel like you're driving -- the car responds to the wheel and the pedals -- but you can't hit that kid on the crosswalk or even break the speed limit more than a small percentage because the car obeys Asimov's laws of robotics, where human legislators setting speed limits on behalf of the community override any immediate commands issued by individual human drivers. (Maybe you could hit a big red button to switch to 100-percent manual and 100-mph zoom, but that should also summon the cops to give you assistance and an escort to the hospital or police station in your apparent emergency.)
posted by pracowity at 8:45 AM on July 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is a well-done comic that uses the bad thinking behind bad driving as a metaphor for a lot of other current societal woes

I don't think very many people explicitly think about driving the way the guy in the comic does, though the parts about bad risk assessment apply. That's why the analogy was chosen, because it looks absurd.
posted by atoxyl at 10:17 AM on July 1, 2017 [2 favorites]